Description
As an activist and a researcher, I consider activist research to be an approach that most centrally is guided by ethics of commitment and care, moving solely beyond a focus on political alignment (Hale, 2006). In this paper, I will argue in favor of expanding our understanding of activist research beyond overtly political acts of solidarity and explain why commitment and care to a “community of resistance” (Davis, 2011) should be understood as the guiding ethics of an activist research approach. I will explore decolonized approaches to research that women of color and Indigenous women activist researchers in the social sciences have developed that center commitment and care, including “re-membering” (Blackwell 2011); practicing ongoing reflexivity (Grande 2016); centering Indigenous epistemologies (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, and Wright 2014) and community-led research (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Hussey, and Wright 2014; Smith 2012), as well as the challenges of implementing these approaches within political science. Finally, I will discuss ethical and epistemological considerations that activist researchers need to take into consideration when doing research with communities of color and Indigenous communities, including the right of refusal, limits on research, and moving towards strengths rather than deficit-based research (Tuck and Yang, 2016).
